Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly (...) context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy. (shrink)

Las democracias representativas parecen estar en la actualidad ante tendencias divergentes. Por un lado, se dan síntomas de declive tales como el descenso generalizado del número de votantes en los días de eleciones o el creciente distanciamiento entre los políticos y los ciudadanos. Por otra parte, existen ocasiones en los que el público parece adquirir un creciente papel político como resultado de un nuevo escenario mediático que ofrece oportunidades para la participación política. Estas tendencias heterogéneas han llevado a interpretar de (...) forma diferente la situación actual de la democracia: una que apunta a su declive y otra que señala los procesos de transformación democrática. Dos comprensiones opuestas de entender el presente que nos plantea el reto de preguntarnos por cual de los dos esta más cerca de esbozar un boceto arquitectónico certero de la democracia hoy. Este artículo trata de resolver esta cuestión prestando especial atención al papel que desempeña la nueva galaxia mediática en promocionar nuevas formas de participación ciudadana. (shrink)

The unmanaged organization is moving from coffee corners to social networks. This means not only a change of media, but also a transformation in how organizations exert control over workers and how workers resist the commodification of emotions. After analyzing instances of the online publication of images and texts that escape organizational control, we identified three main ambiguities helpful in framing future studies about organizational control and resistance: ambiguity between private and public spheres, ambiguity between spontaneous and performed manifestations, and (...) ambiguity between the distribution and control of power. Our main contribution is to understanding the Internet, particularly social networks, as a medium for employee resistance through distance, and in using the three aforementioned ambiguities to help analyze this phenomenon. (shrink)

In our text, we follow the traces of a (1) paradox, (2) an ambivalence and (3) a dialectic that constitute digitalized public spheres and discuss the resulting tensions in discourse-ethical and political-theoretical perspectives using the blocking of Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account as an example. Starting from this, we determine the conditions of constitution of the digital public sphere and locate the dynamics of its development in the dialectical tension between private and public: The fact that the two other relations (...) of autonomy and heteronomy, intensification and polarization come to such a head is based on an insufficient socialization of all those means of production that produce the current digital public sphere. Using the example of Donald J. Trump’s recently suspended Twitter account and with a view to Habermas’s discourse ethics, we illustrate the extent to which Trump’s partly racist and conspiracy-theoretical post violates discourse ethics standards and is also highly problematic with regard to the political; however, banishment from a part of the digital public sphere is certainly not an act that should be incumbent on a private company. From this, we conclude that the normative potentials of digital public spheres can only be vol. (shrink)

The questions of this article are: what can we learn from deliberative democratic theory, its critics, the practices of local deliberative communities, the needs of potential participants, and the experiences of virtual communities that would be useful in designing a technology-facilitated institution for global civil society that is deliberative and democratic in its values? And what is the appropriate design of such an online institution so that it will be attentive to the undemocratic forces enabled by power inequalities that can (...) emerge in discursive communities? I answer these questions with an institutional innovation that meets a need of global civil society and that is responsive to critics of deliberative democratic theory and attentive to the particular agents engaged in women's human rights activism. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper selected by ICIL 2019 committee in Rome is to demonstrate the current importance of the internet in the protection of democracy in developting countries.Design/methodology/approachIt is intended to make a comparison with the growing and current phenomenon of Brazilian disinformation with other contemporary phenomena related to new technologies through literature review methodology.FindingsThe Brazilian elections in 2018 represent an authentic model in a post-Cambridge Analytical phase where the myth of the sanctity of data has been broken. The (...) big influence of the algorithmic revolution on democracies in Latin America has never been more evident. The misuse of algorithms created an artificial environment that does not put us in contact with different realities; the consequences of this conjuncture have the deepest impacts, especially in countries that rely on a deficient educational system.Social implicationsBesides that, the broad use of zero-rating on the internet delivery in developing countries is also considered a factor of fake news dissemination. The information bubbles promote political polarization to the detriment of diversity – and the diversity is par excellence one of the pillars of democracy.Originality/valueThe research about the impact that the phenomenon of disinformation has on underdeveloped countries, it is essential to analyze the new role of the legislator in the elaboration of hypercomplex laws with multi-stakeholder interests that respect the essential core of digital human rights as the freedom of expression online. (shrink)